various emphatic passages of something more than friendship, the
true love does not at once stand forth, that he may find "the
partition-wall between love and friendship with women to be very visible
and very thick." But one day the accursed watch-paper flutters into
Joachime's hand, who at once takes it for a declaration of love to
herself, and beams with appropriate tenderness. Victor, seized with
sudden coldness and resolution, confesses all to Joachime; and the
story, released from its feminine embarrassments, would soon reach a
honeymoon, if it were not for the difficulty of deciding the parentage
and relationship of the various characters. A wise child knows its own
father; but no endowment of wisdom in the reader will harmonize the
genealogy of this romance. A birth-mark of a Stettin apple, which is
visible only in autumn when that fruit is ripening, plays the part of
Box's strawberry in the farce, and with as much perspicuity.

However, the characters are all respectably connected at last, and the
reader does not care to understand how they were ever disconnected: for
Lord Horion's motive in putting the children of the old Prince out of
the way, and keeping up such an expensive mystification, can be
justified only by an interesting plot. But American readers have learned
by this time, much to their credit, not to apply to Jean Paul for the
sensation of a cunningly woven narrative, like that of the English
school, which furnishes verisimilitude to real life that is quite as
improbable, though less glaringly so, than his departures from it.
"Hesperus" is filled with pure and noble thought. The different types of
female character are particularly well-defined; and if Jean Paul
sometimes affects to say cynical things of women, he cannot veil his
passionate regard for them, nor his profound appreciation of the
elements of their influence in forming true society and refining the
hearts of men. Notice the delicacy of the "Extra Leaf on Houses full of
Daughters." It is chiefly with the women of his romances that Jean Paul
succeeds in depicting individuals. And when we recollect the corrupt and
decaying generation out of which his genius sprang, like a newly created
species, to give a salutary shock to Gallic tastes, and lend a sturdy
country vigor to the new literature, we reverence his faithfulness, his
incorruptible humanity, his contempt for petty courts and faded manners,
his passion for Nature, and his love of God.